I sometimes think about an extended project of making stock images for various concepts. When I look at Unsplash, I see a few really gifted photographers who account for some of the best examples in quite a few categories and then there’s some terrible stuff that is plainly intended for corporate sites and reports (most of that is not free to use but is in the iStock site associated with Unsplash).
But the one time I tried tackling this idea I found that it’s actually really hard. Most good stock imagery has to have people in it. The people have to be able to pose moderately well (e.g., seem somewhat natural) and if I were going to be involved, I’d want them to be diverse in every sense. That pretty much means paying people even if the goal is just to give away the photos for free.
That’s the least of the problems, though. I think more that I find it incredibly hard to think conceptually when it comes to photography. I wish I were better at it—if I were, I’d likely have more profound creative ambitions than just making better stock images for other people to use. When I spent a week trying to think of photographic representations of various aspects of academic life—disciplines, research, teaching—that weren’t the usual visual cliches of people in labs, people lecturing in front of big blackboards, etc., the only things I could come up with were awful, unworkable visual puns, the kind that are so bad that you have to explain them to people.
The only halfway decent thing I came up with was this image, I think, as an illustration of the conventional idea of “liberal arts” as interdisciplinary inquiry, or STEAM as “STEM + humanities”. It’s still not very subtle but at least it is an ok image in its own right.
It did teach me yet another thing about a lot of conceptual photography, stock or otherwise: you have to have access to a lot of props.
It is, in any event, yet another place where I recognize the advantages and problems of autodidactical learning. There’s no barrier to just trying something, to seeing an ambition or an idea and jumping in, and learning from experience. But what you learn, more often than not, is that something that might seem easy is in fact quite difficult, and that sometimes it’s calling on you to have insights or ideas that you simply don’t have and can’t easily generate on your own, where a more conventional structured education might have built a solid foundation that led you more methodically to that point.